Please, please do a better job of pretending when doing the UK (also probably the rest of Europe). It really makes it hard to stick with my suspension of disbelief when nothing, absolutely nothing looks right. Elementary’s London looked an awful lot like the US. And it turns out The Librarian’s ‘London’ looks nothing like England, not even vaguely.
Almost every show that uses bits of the US that look vaguely like the UK fails dramatically to make the US actually look like the UK; although The Librarians is the laziest effort I’ve seen in a long time. Just blurring out US licence plates doesn’t make them look like British ones. And really simple things like road markings, signage, and interior shots with light switches. For reference, this is a British light switch:
Neither this:
Nor even this:
Looks sufficiently like it to pass off as one.
It seems like small stuff, and in a show as bare-faced-silly as The Librarians you might think it doesn’t matter, but it is really distracting. Par example; go to google image search and type in ‘london shops’. Go on. Try it.
Now tell me which bit of London this looks like, exactly?
Even worse, incidentally, having ‘set the scene’ with some stock locationy shots, they don’t actually use the outside of that very-not-london scene anyway. At least, not sufficiently to make it worth completely screwing with the concept that it’s meant to be London.
And where in the UK is this road?
This road on which are parked cars with strangely blurry number plates and which oddly appears to have ‘double yellows’ (or a no-parking restriction) oddly painted down the centre of the road…
Which is not to say I don’t like The Librarians. I mean, it’s not exactly the best writing in the world, but it’s fun and silly and enjoyable. And then they have to break my suspension of disbelief with this easy, simple, not-hard-to-fix stuff.
Lord, you’re doing enough digital image stuff, fix the damn road markings and find a faux location that at least actually looks a bit like England…
And don’t get me started on the Dick Van Dyke style accents… Seriously.
